


Like Wolves Across the Desert Wastes

by gaslightgallows (hearts_blood)



Category: Crimson Peak (2015)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, F/M, Fear, Gen, Introspection, Loneliness, Lucille can't be alone, Missing Scene, Trains, Travel, bad things will happen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-05
Updated: 2018-04-05
Packaged: 2019-04-18 19:59:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14220660
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hearts_blood/pseuds/gaslightgallows
Summary: Lucille travels home from Buffalo alone, leaving Thomas behind.





	Like Wolves Across the Desert Wastes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lise](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lise/gifts).



> Written for the prompt “Her pain was like a desert...” (Lucille) (veliseraptor)
> 
> If you're over on Tumblr, please consider following me at [gaslightgallows.tumblr.com](http://gaslightgallows.tumblr.com) for more fic, reblogs about writing, and lots of randomness. Thank you for reading and especially for commenting. Comments are love. ♥

_“Loin des peuples vivants, errantes, condamnées,_  
_À travers les déserts courez comme les loups;_  
_Faites votre destin, âmes désordonnées,_  
_Et fuyez l'infini que vous portez en vous!”_  
_– Charles Baudelaire, “Femmes Damnées (Delphine et Hippolyte)”_

* * *

 

She always hated this part of the business. The need to leave Thomas alone with the latest bride-to-be, to allow him to give a veneer of sincerity and authenticity to the protestations of love and devotion that he would heap upon the poor heartsick idiot they had selected for slaughter, was always an agony for her nerves. Lucille so abhorred leaving Thomas alone with anyone who was not her. Even granting him a few hours of peace in which to conduct business was sometimes a wrench. It was, perhaps, better than being forced to _hear_ him telling another woman how much he loved her... but she still hated it.

And this time, it was far worse.

After her business with Carter Cushing was disposed of, Lucille had immediately boarded a train for New York City... alone. Only second-class, this time. She had to save what funds she had left. It wasn't that she was incapable of traveling by herself – often she had to conduct business in London (of a personal, health-related nature) that she could not pass along to Thomas to handle. The doctors would have fainted rather than relay such details to a mere brother. But she felt lessened by his absence, as though she had left behind an arm or a lung or a wing in Buffalo. And she felt unsettled at having left him behind, and that in the care of someone who knew nothing of Thomas's need or dreams or desires, things that Lucille knew as intimately as she knew his body because his needs and desires were the same as hers, identical and exquisitely in tune.

It was a brutally long trip, and she neither ate nor slept. Thomas adored all manner of travel, but Lucille had never mastered the art of functioning on a train, and without Thomas to cajole her into eating, or to offer her his shoulder to rest her head on, all she could do was stare out of the window at the dreary, cattle-filled countryside. Occasionally there was a town, and a depot, and people would disembark or board, and then the puff and chug and clatter would begin again in all their unending monotonous madness.

Thomas so loved trains. He loved all machines, really. Anything artificial, that he could take apart and examine and put back together again. Lucille couldn't think of a clock at Allerdale that he hadn't dismantled a hundred times over, just for the sake of reassembling it in the end. It was foolish, of course, but she adored watching him at work. He had such unearthly hands...

But she had never been able to share that mechanical fascination, or to nurture in him her enjoyment of her own work. Lucille preferred living things. How they worked, and how they stopped working. There was nothing delicate about that process, however, and Thomas was so very delicate in his pleasures.

It was only right that she should be the one of them to concern herself with the more unpleasant side of the family business, she reflected, as the light outside faded, leaving her staring into a black void that seemed to stretch on and on, and yet be just there, on the other side of the glass, close enough to touch. She was the elder, the stronger, the more determined. He was the dreamer. That was worth preserving.

Lucille never dreamed anymore.

The electric lights filled the train carriage with a cold, clinical light, and she thought longingly of home. The electrical generator at Allerdale that Thomas had built was small, only sufficient to power the lift and the lights of the underground clay pits that it led to. The rest of the house lingered dimly in the gas-and-candle-lit past of her childhood. He had offered to build a bigger generator, a better one. If she let her brother have his way, he would electrify the entire house. But Lucille did not need the light. She knew the layout of the house like a lover. Its threadbare carpets and warped floorboards were paths worn smooth by her feet, and the clay-stained and cracked walls were as good as a raised map for fingers that knew how to read them. She was safe at Allerdale, she and Thomas. It was the only place where they could be safe.

She lost herself in reveries of home, where the air was cold and uncaring and laced with the familiar scent and taste of red clay. Her mouth watered at the thought.

The train sounded a mournful howl as it sped on into the night. There was so little to see out of the window that finally Lucille had to close her eyes to shut out the lurking terror of the sheer nothingness that engulfed them. It was nothing like the darkness of the moors at home, where the wind shrieked over the gorse and through the chimneys. That was the native night, the ancestral long dark night of the Sharpes. She carried it in the marrow of her bones, wherever she went. This was different. The train hurtled its passengers through nothing, towards nothing. There was nothing at the other end of the track – no Thomas, no home. No hope.

The memory of the taste of clay in the air, on her skin and on Thomas's skin, was fainter now, overtaken by the sickly-sweetness of ether in her nostrils, of antiseptic and camphor and the feeling of being smothered in cotton wool. How revolting it had been, in the asylum, to have to pretend remorse and regret for all those years, for the sake of being allowed access to a piano and to be permitted to write to Thomas and to read his letters. To pretend to be sane, when she was already too sane to function in a world gone made with vulgarity and indifference...

At least the girl Thomas had insisted on seducing wasn't vulgar. Lucille felt vaguely sorry for her, as she did for a butterfly writhing on a pin. Not for putting the old man aside – he had behaved abominably badly in the name of 'protecting' his child, and Lucille had been all too happy to obliterate his face from all of their lives – but for the girl herself. She was so bright and wondering, so unlike their original subject. She seemed to move through the world as a being from an entirely different plane. If Lucille could have borne the thought of parting with Thomas, Edith Cushing would not have been a bad choice. She might, even, have understood... well, it hardly mattered now. She would soon be Thomas's wife, and then she would be dead, and that would be the end of it.

It seemed like centuries before the train finally reached the massive ant-hill that was the terminal in New York City, and Lucille could unfold her stiff legs from the red velvet seat where she had remained for twelve hours. She stood slowly, aware that she had not eaten or drunk or even relieved herself since that morning. She was used to the need for such self-control. The poverty of the estate, her time in the asylum, and her mother's method of child-rearing, had trained her well for self-denial. But Thomas promised that after this, they would not need to deny themselves anymore.

She had been prepared, in Buffalo, for him to object to her plan for dealing with the recalcitrant builder, particularly as Thomas seemed to like him, but Carter Cushing's insistence on cruelty had overwhelmed Thomas's natural annoying need to ingratiate himself with older, successful men, and sparked a fire in the blackest parts of her brother's soul. He rarely wasted energy upon being vindictive and vengeful, but when he did, oh... Lucille smiled possessively to herself as she directed a porter to take her luggage and find her a cab. He had been incandescent, that final night at the hotel in Buffalo, with rage and righteous fury, and she so rarely got to have him when he was so very vexed. She could make a meal of that night for _days_...

And she would have to, she realized, upon checking into the hotel she had wired to reserve that morning. The sleepy desk clerk took the register with her signature and handed her a room key and a telegram. "Came in this afternoon," he managed, hiding an enormous yawn behind his hand. His cuffs were dirty, Lucille noted with distaste.

She waited until she was alone in her room to open it, until she had locked and barred the connecting door to the room that should have been Thomas's, and jammed the dressing table chair under the knob of the door to the corridor and stuffed handkerchiefs into the keyholes. Only then did Lucille open the telegram.

Thomas's staccato message was exultant.

**SHE SAID YES -STOP- MUST STAY FOR FUNERAL BUSINESS ARRANGEMENTS THEN WEDDING NEXT WEEK -STOP- HOPE BE HOME EARLY DEC -STOP- TRUST ME -END-**

Early December. It was November twenty-eighth.

Lucille's own ship would leave New York in two days, so with a week or so to cross and the better part of a day to get from the port in Liverpool to her home in Cumberland, she expected to travel ten days by herself. But she had neglected to account for – or had forced herself to not comprehend fully - the time Thomas would need to travel, to follow her.

If the wedding was next week, and he had not indicated when next week, and the crossing from New York to Liverpool took a week to ten days, depending on the weather – and Thomas would be taking his ship well in the beginning of the winter travel season – then it would be at least two weeks before she saw her brother again. Possibly three.

Three weeks. They had never been apart for so long. Not since they had been ripped apart as children.

The days and nights alone that awaited her stretched out like an unending desert, cold and desolate, and Lucille sank to the worn hotel carpet with a moan. Too exhausted to cry, and recoiling from the thought of the empty bed, she slept there.

She did not dream, but her sleep was filled with the howling of a phantom train, careening through a unending night.


End file.
